Dev Chat Agenda – September 10, 2025

Welcome!

The WordPress coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. development team builds WordPress! Follow this site for general updates, status reports, and the occasional code debate. There’s lots of ways to contribute:

Found a bugbug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority.? Create a ticket in the bug tracker.

Want to contribute? Get started quickly with tickets marked as good first bugs for new contributors or join a bug scrub. There’s more on the reports page, like patches needing testing, and on feature projects page.

Other questions? Here is a detailed handbook for contributors, complete with tutorials.

The next WordPress Developers Chat will take place on Wednesday, September 10, 2025, at 15:00 UTC in the core channel on Make WordPress Slack.

The live meeting will focus on the discussion for upcoming releases, and have an open floor section.

The various curated agenda sections below refer to additional items. If you have ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. requests for help, please continue to post details in the comments section at the end of this agenda or bring them up during the dev chat.

Announcements 📢

Forthcoming releases 🚀

WordPress 6.9

WordPress 6.9 is scheduled for Tuesday, December 2, 2025.

The roadmap for 6.9 has been published.
Please take a look to see what’s actively being worked on for release later in the year.

WP 6.9 Dev notesdev note Each important change in WordPress Core is documented in a developers note, (usually called dev note). Good dev notes generally include a description of the change, the decision that led to this change, and a description of how developers are supposed to work with that change. Dev notes are published on Make/Core blog during the beta phase of WordPress release cycle. Publishing dev notes is particularly important when plugin/theme authors and WordPress developers need to be aware of those changes.In general, all dev notes are compiled into a Field Guide at the beginning of the release candidate phase.:

A first 6.9 dev notedev note Each important change in WordPress Core is documented in a developers note, (usually called dev note). Good dev notes generally include a description of the change, the decision that led to this change, and a description of how developers are supposed to work with that change. Dev notes are published on Make/Core blog during the beta phase of WordPress release cycle. Publishing dev notes is particularly important when plugin/theme authors and WordPress developers need to be aware of those changes.In general, all dev notes are compiled into a Field Guide at the beginning of the release candidate phase. was published: Prettier Emails: Supporting Inline Embedded Images

See all dev notes published for 6.9.

Discussions 💬

The discussion section of the agenda is for discussing important topics affecting the upcoming release or larger initiatives that impact the CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Team. To nominate a topic for discussion, please leave a comment on this agenda with a summary of the topic, any relevant links that will help people get context for the discussion, and what kind of feedback you are looking for from others participating in the discussion.

@mindctrl wants to discuss ticket #5276 and the possibility to include this pretty old ticket to milestone 6.9.
@anonymooo proposes to discuss ticket #63678.

Open floor 🎙️

Any topic can be raised for discussion in the comments, as well as requests for assistance on tickets. Tickets in the milestone for the next major or maintenance release will be prioritized.

Please include details of tickets / PRs and the links in the comments, and indicate whether you intend to be available during the meeting for discussion or will be async.

#6-9, #agenda, #core, #dev-chat

Dennis Snell 9:01 pm on September 9, 2025

I’d like to discuss one specific part of standardizing UTF-8 handling in the upcoming release, from Core-63863.

While this work has morphed and expanded throughout the release cycle, I believe I have found a place that’s a good end, a final form, which involves one change worth discussing: adding a new compat-utf8.php module which loads before compat.php and polyfills missing mbstring functionality for UTF-8.

This new compatibility layer implies a normalization of UTF-8 handling across all runtime environments (something WordPress has not had before) in a spec-compliant way. It therefore also implies the removal of a lot of ad-hoc checks for various ways of counting, splitting, and validating strings.

Most notably this adds a new compatibility module loaded early (before compat.php), and I thought it would be best to conditionally define the polyfilled functions such as mb_substr() since there’s no point in performing a compatibility check on every call to these string functions. A single call during PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 7.4 or higher’s boot phase suffices because we don’t expect the mbstring extension or PHP version to change during a request.

The code is not ready in its final form, but I wanted to raise attention to the change since compat.php is a sensitive place. I plan on attending the meeting to discuss further. With no objections I would like to have this code ready and merged this week.

Thanks!
Estela Rueda 1:30 pm on September 10, 2025

Can we add this post to open floor to continue with a conversation from last week regarding the participation of the docs team in releases

Welcome!

Communication

Announcements 📢

Forthcoming releases 🚀

WordPress 6.9

Discussions 💬

Open floor 🎙️

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